Anti-Semitism's vile past, present and future

Neo Nazis, alt-right member and white supremacists march through the University of Virginia Campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va., USA on Aug. 11, 2017. (Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

It’s the hate that won’t go away.

For most of her professional life, Deborah Lipstadt has been studying the Holocaust. She teaches the topic at Emory University. She took on fringe historians in her book "Denying the Holocaust." When one sued her for libel, she took him on in court and won. That story later became the Rachel Weisz movie, "Denial."

But the Queens native has recently put aside the history texts. In her new book, "Antisemitism: Here and Now," she finds that ancient bigotry is still alive and thriving in sophisticated European cities and elite American universities.

The hatred goes back millennia, Lipstadt writes, a way for the majority to blame a minority for everything from missing children to the Black Death.

By the 19th-century, there was a lie — and a villain — to fit every economic class. If you were poor, you cursed Jewish bankers and landlords. If you were rich, you feared Jewish anarchists and revolutionaries. It was a very adaptable kind of bigotry.

Anti-Semitism flourished for centuries before the rise of Hitler, and the horrors of the Holocaust. And it will take much more than the defeat of the Third Reich, and the liberation of the camps, to make that lingering hatred go away.

Especially when it’s still taking slippery new forms.

Although Lipstadt stops short of calling President Trump anti-Semitic, she notes he seems awfully comfortable with ugly old assumptions. Giving a campaign speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition, he praised Jews for having business savvy, knowing how to haggle, and using their money to control politicians.

As Lipstadt writes, “In a few sentences, Trump hit almost every millennial-old antisemitic stereotype.” And these were people he was trying to win over.

Trump also promoted bigoted imagery, like a picture of Hillary Clinton next to piles of money and a six-pointed star. On a presidential trip to Poland, he skipped visiting the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto, but urged Poles to beware of mysterious internal "forces" that "threaten your culture, faith, and tradition." The language could have come straight out of 1933 Germany.

Yet he’s restrained compared to some of his supporters.

Journalists who criticize him or his family are often greeted with vicious harassment. After GQ ran a mildly critical profile of Melania Trump, her husband’s fans threatened the Jewish author with rape. Others sent pictures of Holocaust victims, the writer’s face Photoshopped in.

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Lipstadt worries more, though, about what happens when these people stop Tweeting and instead take to the streets.

What’s truly disturbing about right-wing rallies, she writes, aren’t the bigots who arrive in white hoods or sporting swastikas. It’s the clean-cut ones who try to normalize hatred, wearing khakis and polo shirts, spewing hate, urging genocide all the while waving the American flag.

Of course, it's not just in America, and it's not just the right wing. In Great Britain, Lipstadt found ugly evidence of anti-Semitism among the left, where an initial, pro-Palestinian slant has turned into an anti-Israeli — and finally and anti-Jewish — bias.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has defended a crackpot conspiracy theorist, who blamed Israel for blowing up the World Trade Center and claimed Jews kidnap Gentiles to harvest their organs. Meanwhile, Ken Loach, an acclaimed leftist filmmaker, has not only defended Corbyn but refused to condemn Holocaust deniers. His loaded response: “History is for us all to discuss.”

At least bigots on the right admit their anti-Semitism. Accuse someone on the left of hating Jews, and they're quick to say, no, they are merely anti-Israel.

But, Lipstadt asks, how different is that, really? Because it’s not just Israeli politics that are under attack, she writes, but an entire people. And when Jews come under fire, the left doesn’t rush to their defense.

For example, Lipstadt describes an ugly mural in England depicting wealthy, hook-nosed men playing Monopoly on a table made of the backs of people of color. Answering critics, the artist said that “older white Jewish folk” simply didn’t want to see their ancestors portrayed as “the demons they are.” Corbyn defended that art, too.

Yet Europeans rarely defend art that offends Muslims.

After Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" was published in 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini called for the British author's assassination. Few English authors supported their colleague. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper even seemed to endorse the threatened violence, saying that if some outraged British Muslim gave Rushdie a beating, "society would benefit, and literature would not suffer."

Having one rule for Jews and another for everyone else is a double standard, Lipstadt argues. And it’s everywhere.

For example, she writes, criticizing Israel doesn't make you anti-Semitic. Many Israelis question their country's policies. But if you criticize Israel's human rights record, and not Saudi Arabia's? If you genuinely believe boycotts, divestment and sanctions are the best way to reform a brutal government – but never urge applying those methods to China, then what is it, or who is it, you're really opposed to?

As a longtime professor, Lipstadt knows academia well and warns it's losing its status as a haven for the free exchange of ideas. Anti-Israel protesters often shut down lectures by invited Jewish speakers, even when those guests are political moderates, talking about peace. Some students don't want to listen and want to ensure others can't.

In trying to cater to a sensitive generation — setting up safe spaces and recognizing trigger warnings — colleges are hindering free speech, Lipstadt writes. It’s not just liberal Israelis who suffer, either; American right-wingers like Ann Coulter have found themselves banned from campuses, too, for fear their words alone would lead to riots.

Minister Louis Farrakhan displays the book, "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews," during a 2011 speech Jackson State University in Mississippi. (Rogelio V. Solis / Associated Press)

Even after college, it can be difficult for Jewish progressives to find organizations that are both liberal and Israel-friendly. Although the Women’s March against Trump was united at first, it soon began to splinter. Some organizers turned out to be supporters of Minister Louis Farrakhan, who has called Judaism “a gutter religion” and blamed “degenerate” Jews for, among other things, “turning men into women and women into men.”

You might think, Lipstadt notes, that statements like that would force progressives to quickly create some distance between them and the Nation of Islam leader. Yet Women's March leaders refused to condemn Farrakhan. Instead, they issued a muddled response that "intersectional movement building is difficult and often painful."

As Lipstadt notes, “I suppose it is, particularly when you are trying to intersect with an antisemitic homophobe.”

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Still, she concludes — after detailing a sickening litany of lies, insults, and physical attacks — it's not all bad. In fact, it can't be all bad. To see the long, rich history of the Jews strictly through the prism of anti-Semitism, Lipstadt says, is to cut yourself off from everything that has made survival possible through the centuries. You must acknowledge the pain in life and celebrate the pleasure.